The Bullet
by skullanddog
Summary: The Turks go on a holiday. Rude reminds Reno there's more to the past than bad memories. Elena really like trains!


_**A.N:** My first Final Fantasy fic! Reno, Rude and Elena take a holiday. Not as angsty as it sounds. Rude reminds his old friend that there's more to the past then bad memories._

_xxx xxx xxx_

"Don't you just love trains?"

God, she's still talking. I sink further into the seat, and search her face for something to stare at.

"I've always loved trains, ever since I was a child."

There. There, at the corner of her left eye, her mascara is gunked. A tiny black spot that seems to swell as I stare at it. Usually she hates being stared at. Usually it shuts her up. If I stare for long enough she'll get angry and storm out. Then it'll just be me and Rude, and he never speaks anyway.

Today, though, Elena is persistent.

"I used to watch the Bullet train chuffing around the city every day. It sounds silly now I guess, since it came true, but I used to dream that one day I would ride that train to work!" she laughs. Her face is flushed red, she's so eager to tell us this.

I narrow my eyes at her and she grins happily back. There's a smear of grey across the carriage window as the train pulls out of the city. This isn't _the _train, not the Midgar city train, not the ShinRa Bullet Elena is talking about.

And we aren't going to work today. We aren't going to work ever again. The Bullet is just a twisted neck of scrap metal, dangling by its last carriage from the warped steel tracks, a hundred and fifty feet above the deserted Midgar slums. It's been there for four years, now. No one can live in Midgar, so distorted and precarious and full of infection since the calamity. We can only watch as it falls further into ruin, we homesick citizens who have built our new city on the outer wreck of the old.

Scraps of decaying metal drop off the misshapen face of Midgar like gangrenous fingers. The Bullet has held on so far, but every time a strong wind picks up, it sways and groans like a rusted chandelier.

On a clear day, when the sea breeze gusts in from the west and forces the smog down, I can look out my apartment window and see the Bullet hanging there. I can make out the shattered carriage windows and red rust stains that look like blood in the evening.

But I don't. I don't look.

Elena hasn't gone away. "How 'bout you, Reno? I bet you love trains, too. Didn't you ever watch the Bullet when it ran through the city?"

I want to pick her up and shake her. The city, our city, _my_ city, is dead, dead, dead. Can't you see that contorted heap of steel and stone, perched out there like a crucifix? Don't you know that everyone in it is gone?

"The city," I say, dropping my head so that I'm staring at her with my eyes instead of my nostrils, "is dead."

She shuts up then.

A merciful silence descends. The three of us sit there, close together, knees touching, the portrait of friends looking forward to a holiday. Our bags are on the floor between us, stuffed with flowery Hawaiian shirts and airport paperbacks and thongs and other useless junk that we're never gonna need and never gonna use.

I think about the brand-name board shorts I bought when we booked the trip. That was before I found out that the company was bankrupt.

By time we found out that we going to be booted out on our asses, it was too late to cancel the holiday. Can't blame the company, though. I should've seen it coming. You can't pay out compensation to every family that lost someone in the Midgar calamity _and _fund the rebuilding of a new city _and_ hire a handful of suit monkeys like us full-time permanent. Not forever.

Though they did, for four years.

And then, for some reason, I think of the rent.

I can't pay the rent this month.

"Well," says Elena.

Her voice is a wrench against the clockwork clunk and grind of the train. The Flying Canon, that what they call it. TransMidgar-Junon, though there's no Midgar anymore and Junon is a ghost town hospitable only to ignorant tourists.

"If you two are going to be all mopey, I'm leaving." Elena stands up. She stares at me, and I tear my gaze from the gunk of mascara at her eyes and look out the window instead.

Elena told me once that she didn't like my eyes. Before we were bankrupt, before Midgar died, back when we were just workmates and thugs and when we were close enough to be family.

In those days, you could tell someone you worked for ShinRa without fear of what they'd do to you. People blame ShinRa for the calamity that destroyed their city, their lives. For all I know, they're right to.

"I'll be at the bar."

With a flutter of her black jacket and a glimpse of designer shoes, she's gone.

The bar. They built this goddamn train with a bar.

"Reno."

The situation strikes me as funny somehow, but I can't laugh. I can't stop thinking about the rent.

"Reno, man."

Rude is talking. I'm a little surprised. I could count on one hand the number of words Rude has spoken since the company told him he was fired. It's a daunting task, facing unemployment in an economy as crippled as ours.

"What's up?"

For Rude's sake, I force a grin.

He gives me a small smile in return. "Remember when you and I used to watch the trains?"

We did? I think hard for a minute, but come up empty handed. I remember taking the Bullet to work every morning, how it was a pain in the neck because it was always over-crowded and reeked of urine and spirits.

"I don't remember."

"Before we worked for ShinRa." Rude's smile turns up a little more at the edges. Behind his dark glasses, his brown eyes are shining.

"Before ShinRa, you and I were enemies." I point out.

"We were children." He says.

Like that mattered? It was true enough, though. Rude wasn't born in Midgar, he was born in Junon, where we're headed for our ill-financed holiday. His parents were well-to-do and strict, both being part of the then extensive Junon navy. Rude moved to Midgar when he was 15, to live with his aunt. He wanted a career, and Midgar is a good place to start if you know the right people.

"You were living by yourself," Rude says, reading my mind as usual.

I was living in the slums below Midgar proper. A lot of people were, probably two thirds of the city's population. People in the Midgar slums were lucky if they had nothing. And they were superstitious, incredibly superstitious.

ShinRa dominated their lives, and they despised it. At that stage, you remember, ShinRa was so huge and so influential that in reality, it governed the city. People in the slums resented the company for this, the poverty it had forced them into, the poverty it chose not to relieve. So if you had eyes like mine, ShinRa eyes, too bright and too cold, you were an instant outcast.

I don't really have ShinRa eyes, though. This is just a birth defect caused by my parents living too close to a Mako byproduct channel. The real ShinRa glow is built up over years of constant exposure to radioactive material. We know that now. We didn't know it then. Back then it was a trademark of everything people reviled.

"I couldn't live with my folks," I tell him, like I've told him a dozen times before, "Every one else thought I was cursed. They would have driven my entire family out of sector 7 if I hadn't left."

Then I remember. After clashing initially, Rude and I found something we both hated more than each other. The Bullet train.

Rude hated it because ShinRa had rejected his job application, again and again and again, and unless you were part of ShinRa you were nobody, with no future, and no chance of ever accomplishing anything.

I just hated it because then, 13 years old and living by myself on the streets, I hated everything.

"We used to climb up to the overpass," I say, and I'm grinning for real now, "And throw junk at it when it went under."

"Paint. We threw paint."

I look at him, and suddenly the rent is the farthest thing from my mind. I don't have to entertain fantasies. I can just entertain my memories.

"They hired us in the end, didn't they?" I laugh.

Rude hesitates for a second, maybe wondering what in hell I find funny about youth vandalism, and then he joins in. When Elena storms back in a minute later, there's tears running down my face and Rude is doubled over, clutching his sides, his face brilliant red.

"What's so funny?" she demands, hands on hips.

Neither of us can breath enough to answer her.

Sometimes, when I look out of my apartment window to the Bullet train, suspended like a crooked pendulum from its twisted track, I can see long streaks of rust on the carriages.

It looks like paint in the morning.

_xxx xxx xxx_

_Ya like it? Please review!  
I wrote this for English homework. We had to write a personal recount of a childhood or young adult memory, but it didn't have to be our own. Wish me luck!_

_-Sax-Hog_


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